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Paul Merrell

Connecting the Dots on PRISM, Phone Surveillance, and the NSA's Massive Spy Center | Th... - 0 views

www.wired.com/...nsa-prism-verizon-surveillance

surveillance state NSA Gen. Alexander lies

shared by Paul Merrell on 17 Jun 13 - No Cached
  • As someone who has written many books and articles about the agency, I have seldom seen the NSA in such a state. Like a night prowler with a bag of stolen goods suddenly caught in a powerful Klieg light, it now finds itself under the glare of nonstop press coverage, accused of robbing the public of its right to privacy. Despite the standard denials from the agency’s public relations office, the documents outline a massive operation to secretly keep track of everyone’s phone calls on a daily basis – billions upon billions of private records; and another to reroute the pipes going in and out of Google, Apple, Yahoo, and the other Internet giants through Fort Meade – figuratively if not literally. 
  • But long before Edward Snowden walked out of the NSA with his trove of documents, whistleblowers there had been trying for years to bring attention to the massive turn toward domestic spying that the agency was making.
  • Without documents to prove their claims, the agency simply dismissed them as falsehoods and much of the mainstream press simply accepted that. “We don’t hold data on U.S. citizens,” Alexander said in a talk at the American Enterprise Institute last summer, by which time he had been serving as the head of the NSA for six years. Director of National Intelligence James Clapper made similar claims. At a hearing of the Senate Intelligence Committee last March, he was asked, “Does the NSA collect any type of data at all on millions or hundreds of millions of Americans?” To which Clapper responded, “No, sir.” The documents released by Snowden, pointing to the nationwide collection of telephone data records and not denied by government officials, prove the responses untrue.
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • The deception by General Alexander is especially troubling. In my new cover story for Wired’s July issue, which will be published online Thursday, I show how he has become the most powerful intelligence chief in the nation’s history. Never before has anyone in America’s intelligence sphere come close to his degree of power, the number of people under his command, the expanse of his rule, the length of his reign, or the depth of his secrecy. A four-star Army general, his authority extends across three domains: He is director of the world’s largest intelligence service, the National Security Agency; chief of the Central Security Service; and commander of the U.S. Cyber Command. As such, he has his own secret military, presiding over the Navy’s 10th Fleet, the 24th Air Force, and the Second Army.
  • Paul Merrell on 17 Jun 13
     
    Check the video on CSPAN  linked from the paragraph about NSA head General Keith Alexander's talk at the American Enterprise Institute. In response to a Fox News question, Alexander lied at length and in detail along the theme of "We don't hold data on U.S. citizens." With both Alexander and National Intelligence DIrector James Clapper both now caught flat-out lying about keeping records on Americans, why should any Executive Branch statements about the scope of their domestic spying be trusted in the least, given that any official statement on the topic would have to rely on information provided by these two men. We know that they are perfectly willing to lie to the public on that topic. 
Gary Edwards

Political Editors: Dick Morris Corrects the Record on Hillary Clinton - The Patriot Post - 0 views

patriotpost.us/44049

Hillary Political-Corruption

shared by Gary Edwards on 30 Jul 16 - No Cached
  • Then Bill discusses Hillary’s legal career at the Rose Law firm. He doesn’t mention that she made partner when he was elected governor and was only hired when he got elected as attorney general. "He makes as if it was a public service job — it wasn’t. Her main job was to get state business, and she got tens-of-millions of dollars of state business, then hid her participation and the fees by taking an extra share of non-state business to compensate for the fees on state business that she brought in. Her other job was to call the state banking commissioner any time one of her banks got into trouble to get them off.
  • "Bill speaks at length how Hillary was a mother, juggling career and family, taking Chelsea to soccer games and stuff — that’s non-sense. Hillary was a mother but Chelsea in the Arkansas governor’s mansion had a staff of nannies and agents to drive her around and people to be with her, and Hillary didn’t have to bother with any of that. All of that was paid for by the state. "He says she became the warrior in chief over the family finances and that was true, and the result is she learned how to steal. "She accepted a $100,000 bribe from the poultry industry in return for Bill going easy on regulating them, despite new standards. Jim Blair, the poultry lobbyist, gave her $1,000 to invest in the Futures Market and lined up seven to eight other investors and their winnings were all deposited into Hillary’s account. She made $100,000 in a year and she was out. That essentially was a bribe.
  • ”[She did] a phony real-estate deal for Jim McDougal and the Madison Bank to deceive the federal regulators by pretending someone else was buying the property. She was called before a grand jury in 1995 about that but, conveniently, the billing records were lost, couldn’t be found and there wasn’t proof that she worked on it.
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • “Bill talks about her work on the health care task force but doesn’t say the reason it didn’t pass was the task force was discredited because the meetings were all held in secret. A federal judge forced them open and fined the task force several hundred thousand dollars because of their secrecy. "He says that after the health care bill failed in 1994, Hillary went to work on adopting each piece of it piecemeal — mainly health insurance for children. "That is completely the opposite of the truth. The fact is when that bill failed, I called Hillary and I suggested that she support a proposal by Republican Bob Dole that we cover children, and she said, ‘We can’t just cover one part of this. You have to change everything or change nothing.’ Then in 1997 when I repeated that advice to Bill Clinton, we worked together to pass the Children’s Health Insurance Program. I found a lot of the money for that in the tobacco settlement that my friend Dick Scruggs was negotiating.
  • "Then Bill extols her record in the U.S. Senate. In fact, she did practically nothing. There were seven or eight bills that she introduced that passed; almost all of were symbolic — renaming a courthouse, congratulating a high school team on winning the championship. There was only one vaguely substantive bill, and that had a lot of co-sponsors of whom Hillary was just one.
  • "Then he goes to her record in the State Department and manages to tell that story without mentioning the word Benghazi, without mentioning her secret emails, without mentioning he was getting tens of millions — $220 million in speaking fees in return for favorable actions by the State Department.
  • "Also totally lacking in the speech was anything about the war on terror — terror is a word you don’t hear at the Democratic Convention. "Bill says that Hillary passed tough sanctions on Iran for their nuclear program. The opposite is true. "Every time a tough sanction bill was introduced by Senators Menendez or Kirk, Hillary would send Deputy Secretary Wendy Sherman to Capital Hill to testify against it and urge it not to pass, and it was over Hillary’s objections that those sanctions were put into place.
  • ”[Liberal columnist] Maureen Dowd called the speech by Bill Clinton “air brushed.” “It was a hell of a lot more than that — it was fiction. (Also see Morris’s comments after Clinton’s DNC acceptance speech. "It’s strategy and message will be interdicted by reality at every turn. … She basically has no message. … Her entire campaign is, ‘I’m a woman and I am running against Donald Trump. … She bean her speech by saying let’s compromise and work together. Is there any woman in the world less likely to compromise?”)
  • Gary Edwards on 30 Jul 16
     
    "Dick Morris is a nationally recognized political campaign adviser, analyst and author. He was the senior political adviser to Bill Clinton before and after his occupation of the White House. He was campaign manager of Clinton's 1996 re-election, and the architect of his successful "triangulation" rhetorical ruse. Clinton's communications director George Stephanopoulos said of Morris, "No single person had more power over [Bill Clinton]." This week, in a message entitled "What Bill Left Out, Morris corrected the record regarding Clinton's glowing remarks about Hillary Clinton, her personal attributes and professional achievements. Morris's insights into the Clintons are priceless. What follows is a transcript of Morris's comments: "Bill Clinton talked at length about Hillary's idealistic work in college and law school, but he omits that she was defending the Black Panthers who killed security guards; they were on trial in New Haven. She monitored the trial while she was in law school to find evidence that could be grounds for reversal in the event they were convicted. "That summer she went to work for the True-Haft (SP) law firm in CA, headed by True Haft who is the head of the CA Communist Party and that's when she got involved with Saul Alinsky, who became something of a mentor for the rest of her life. "Then Bill says that she went off to Massachusetts and he went to Arkansas, and eventually Hillary followed her heart to join him in Arkansas. He omits that she went to work for the Watergate Committee and was fired from that job for taking home evidence and hiding documents that they needed in the impeachment inquiry. Then she took the DC Bar exam and flunked it, she went to Arkansas because that is the only bar exam she could pass. "He talked about how in the 1970's she took all kinds of pro-bono cases to defend women and children. In her memoirs, she cites one which was a custody case and that's it. In fact, in 1975 she represen
Paul Merrell

Google will 'de-rank' RT articles to make them harder to find - Eric Schmidt - RT World... - 0 views

www.rt.com/...0444-google-alphabet-derank-rt

Russia-Gate censorship Google RT Sputnik litigation

shared by Paul Merrell on 21 Nov 17 - No Cached
  • Eric Schmidt, the Executive Chairman of Google’s parent company Alphabet, says the company will “engineer” specific algorithms for RT and Sputnik to make their articles less prominent on the search engine’s news delivery services. “We are working on detecting and de-ranking those kinds of sites – it’s basically RT and Sputnik,” Schmidt said during a Q & A session at the Halifax International Security Forum in Canada on Saturday, when asked about whether Google facilitates “Russian propaganda.”
  • “We are well of aware of it, and we are trying to engineer the systems to prevent that [the content being delivered to wide audiences]. But we don’t want to ban the sites – that’s not how we operate.”The discussion focused on the company’s popular Google News service, which clusters the news by stories, then ranks the various media outlets depending on their reach, article length and veracity, and Google Alerts, which proactively informs subscribers of new publications.
  • The Alphabet chief, who has been referred to by Hillary Clinton as a “longtime friend,” added that the experience of “the last year” showed that audiences could not be trusted to distinguish fake and real news for themselves.“We started with the default American view that ‘bad’ speech would be replaced with ‘good’ speech, but the problem found in the last year is that this may not be true in certain situations, especially when you have a well-funded opponent who is trying to actively spread this information,” he told the audience.
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • RT America registered under FARA earlier this month, after being threatened by the US Department of Justice with arrests and confiscations of property if it failed to comply. The broadcaster is fighting the order in court.
  • Paul Merrell on 21 Nov 17
     
    " HomeWorld News Google will 'de-rank' RT articles to make them harder to find - Eric Schmidt Published time: 20 Nov, 2017 19:58 Edited time: 21 Nov, 2017 03:41 Get short URL   © Global Look Press Eric Schmidt, the Executive Chairman of Google's parent company Alphabet, says the company will "engineer" specific algorithms for RT and Sputnik to make their articles less prominent on the search engine's news delivery services. "We are working on detecting and de-ranking those kinds of sites - it's basically RT and Sputnik," Schmidt said during a Q & A session at the Halifax International Security Forum in Canada on Saturday, when asked about whether Google facilitates "Russian propaganda." Schmidt appearance begins at 1:07:00 mark, relevant question at 1:33:00 "We are well of aware of it, and we are trying to engineer the systems to prevent that [the content being delivered to wide audiences]. But we don't want to ban the sites - that's not how we operate." The discussion focused on the company's popular Google News service, which clusters the news by stories, then ranks the various media outlets depending on their reach, article length and veracity, and Google Alerts, which proactively informs subscribers of new publications. Read more 'Slap at the First Amendment' - RT America forced to register as foreign agent RT has criticized the proposed move - whose timescale has not been publicized - as arbitrary and a form of censorship. "Good to have Google on record as defying all logic and reason: facts aren't allowed if they come from RT, 'because Russia' - even if we have Google on Congressional record saying they've found no manipulation of their platform or policy violations by RT," Sputnik and RT Editor-in-Chief Margarita Simonyan said in a statement. During the discussion, Schmidt claimed that he was "very strongly not in favor of censorship," but said that he has faith in "ranking" without ackno
Paul Merrell

War escalating in the Mideast - 0 views

The war in Syria is escalating rapidly; is it too late to prevent that war from engulfing the Mideast and possibly beyond? I'm posting snapshots of multiple reports in a single post today because o...

war & peace Syria Israel Turkey Saudis Lebanon Russia Hisbollah Iraq

started by Paul Merrell on 22 May 13 no follow-up yet
Paul Merrell

Inside the NSA's Ultra-Secret China Hacking Group - By Matthew M. Aid | Foreign Policy - 0 views

www.foreignpolicy.com/...tra_secret_china_hacking_group

surveillance state NSA TAO China

shared by Paul Merrell on 14 Jun 13 - No Cached
  • This weekend, U.S. President Barack Obama sat down for a series of meetings with China's newly appointed leader, Xi Jinping. We know that the two leaders spoke at length about the topic du jour -- cyber-espionage -- a subject that has long frustrated officials in Washington and is now front and center with the revelations of sweeping U.S. data mining. The media has focused at length on China's aggressive attempts to electronically steal U.S. military and commercial secrets, but Xi pushed back at the "shirt-sleeves" summit, noting that China, too, was the recipient of cyber-espionage. But what Obama probably neglected to mention is that he has his own hacker army, and it has burrowed its way deep, deep into China's networks.
  • It turns out that the Chinese government's allegations are essentially correct. According to a number of confidential sources, a highly secretive unit of the National Security Agency (NSA), the U.S. government's huge electronic eavesdropping organization, called the Office of Tailored Access Operations, or TAO, has successfully penetrated Chinese computer and telecommunications systems for almost 15 years, generating some of the best and most reliable intelligence information about what is going on inside the People's Republic of China.
Paul Merrell

How Hillary Clinton Ignores Peace - Consortiumnews - 0 views

consortiumnews.com/...-hillary-clinton-ignores-peace

Auction 2016 war & peace Hillary Syria email Israel lies

shared by Paul Merrell on 02 Jul 16 - No Cached
  • Publicly, Hillary Clinton has toyed with both the democracy and humanitarian arguments but one of her official emails – released by the State Department – explains that the underlying reason for the Syrian “regime change” war was the Israeli government’s desire to remove Syria as the link in the supply chain between Iran and Israel’s foe, Lebanon’s Hezbollah.
  • Though undated and unsigned, the Clinton email reflected the then-Secretary of State’s thinking as of late April 2012 (when it appears to have been sent), about one year into the Syrian civil war. The email explains the need for “regime change” in Damascus as important to Israel, which wanted to blunt Iranian regional influence and protect Israel’s “nuclear monopoly,” which is acknowledged quite frankly although Israel’s status as a rogue nuclear state is still considered a state secret by the U.S. government. “The best way to help Israel deal with Iran’s growing nuclear capability is to help the people of Syria overthrow the regime of Bashar Assad,” Clinton’s email states, brushing aside President Obama’s (eventually successful) negotiations to restrict Iran’s nuclear program. “Negotiations to limit Iran’s nuclear program will not solve Israel’s security dilemma,” the Clinton email says. “Nor will they stop Iran from improving the crucial part of any nuclear weapons program — the capability to enrich uranium. At best, the talks between the world’s major powers and Iran that began in Istanbul this April and will continue in Baghdad in May will enable Israel to postpone by a few months a decision whether to launch an attack on Iran that could provoke a major Mideast war.”
  • The email explains: “Iran’s nuclear program and Syria’s civil war may seem unconnected, but they are. For Israeli leaders, the real threat from a nuclear-armed Iran is not the prospect of an insane Iranian leader launching an unprovoked Iranian nuclear attack on Israel that would lead to the annihilation of both countries. What Israeli military leaders really worry about — but cannot talk about — is losing their nuclear monopoly. … “The result would be a precarious nuclear balance in which Israel could not respond to provocations with conventional military strikes on Syria and Lebanon, as it can today. If Iran were to reach the threshold of a nuclear weapons state, Tehran would find it much easier to call on its allies in Syria and Hezbollah to strike Israel, knowing that its nuclear weapons would serve as a deterrent to Israel responding against Iran itself.”
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • In other words, all the “humanitarian” talk about “safe zones” and other excuses for Syrian “regime change” was only the camouflage for Clinton’s desire to protect Israel’s “nuclear monopoly” and the freedom to mount what Israel has called “trimming the grass” operations, periodically mowing down Arabs in Lebanon, Gaza and elsewhere.
  • Paul Merrell on 02 Jul 16
     
    The article quotes at length from the email and is well worth reading. But keep in mind that the consensus position of all U.S. intelligence agencies that Iran had no nuclear weapons program had first been published (and promptly leaked to the LA Times) in 2007. So when Hillary composed this email in 2012, she had to know that there was no truth to the Iranian nukes myth. In other words, she was basing her advocated position on war against Syria on a lie.
Gary Edwards

Rush Limbaugh Discusses Front Page Magazine Civil War Column | Frontpage Mag - 1 views

www.frontpagemag.com/...gazine-civil-daniel-greenfield

civil-war

shared by Gary Edwards on 06 Apr 17 - No Cached
  • Gary Edwards on 06 Apr 17
     
    "The emperor of the airwaves, Rush Limbaugh, discussed a Front Page Magazine column on the Civil War that I wrote. The column titled, The Civil War is Here has raised basic issues about what the left is doing. The left has rejected the outcome of the last two presidential elections won by Republicans. It has rejected the judicial authority of the Supreme Court when it decisions don't accord with its agenda. It rejects the legislative authority of Congress when it is not dominated by the left...  There is no form of legal authority that the left accepts as a permanent institution. It only utilizes forms of authority selectively when it controls them. But when government officials refuse the orders of the duly elected government because their allegiance is to an ideology whose agenda is in conflict with the President and Congress, that's not activism, protest, politics or civil disobedience; it's treason. After losing Congress, the left consolidated its authority in the White House. After losing the White House, the left shifted its center of authority to Federal judges and unelected government officials. Each defeat led the radicalized Democrats to relocate from more democratic to less democratic institutions. Rush Limbaugh discussed the column at length in today's broadcast. Here is some of what he said. "
Paul Merrell

The White House Has Been Covering Up the Presidency's Role in Torture for Years - The I... - 0 views

firstlook.org/...esidencys-role-torture-4-years

war & peace torture CIA Obama-coverup Bush-II Senate-Intelligence-Committee ACLU FOIA war crimes

shared by Paul Merrell on 15 Mar 14 - No Cached
  • On May 10, 2013, John Brennan presented CIA’s response to the Senate Intelligence Committee Torture Report to the President. Official White House Photo by Pete Souza. The fight between the CIA and the Senate Intelligence Committee over the Committee’s Torture Report – which Dan Froomkin covered here – has now zeroed in on the White House. Did the White House order the CIA to withdraw 920 documents from a server made available to Committee staffers, as Senator Dianne Feinstein says the agency claimed in 2010? Were those documents – perhaps thousands of them – pulled in deference to a White House claim of executive privilege, as Senator Mark Udall and then CIA General Counsel Stephen Preston suggested last fall? And is the White House continuing to withhold 9,000 pages of documents without invoking privilege, as McClatchy reported yesterday? We can be sure about one thing: The Obama White House has covered up the Bush presidency’s role in the torture program for years. Specifically, from 2009 to 2012, the administration went to extraordinary lengths to keep a single short phrase, describing President Bush’s authorization of the torture program, secret.
  • As Steven Aftergood, director of the Federation of American Scientists Project on Government Secrecy, noted  in 2009 – shortly after Hayden revealed that torture started as a covert operation – this means there should be a paper trail implicating President Bush in the torture program. “[T]here should be a Presidential ‘finding’ authorizing the program,” he said, “and [] such a finding should have been provided to Congressional overseers.” The National Security Act dictates that every covert operation must be supported by a written declaration finding that the action is necessary and important to the national security. The Congressional Intelligence committees – or at least the Chair and Ranking Member – should receive notice of the finding. But there is evidence that those Congressional overseers were never told that the finding the president signed on September 17, 2001 authorized torture. For example, a letter from then ranking member of the House Intelligence Committee, Jane Harman, to the CIA’s General Counsel following her first briefing on torture asked: “Have enhanced techniques been authorized and approved by the President?” The CIA’s response at the time was simply that “policy as well as legal matters have been addressed within the Executive Branch.”
  • Nevertheless, the finding does exist. The CIA even disclosed its existence in response to the ACLU FOIA, describing it as “a 14-page memorandum dated 17 September 2001 from President Bush to the Director of the CIA pertaining to the CIA’s authorization to detain terrorists.” In an order in the ACLU suit, Judge Alvin K. Hellerstein confirmed that the declaration was “intertwined with” the administration’s effort to keep the language in the Tenet document hidden. When the administration succeeded in keeping that short phrase secret, all effort to release the declaration also ended.
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • Enduring confusion about this particular finding surely exists because of its flexible nature. As Bob Woodward described in Bush at War, CIA Director Tenet asked President Bush to sign “a broad intelligence order permitting the CIA to conduct covert operations without having to come back for formal approval for each specific operation.” As Jane Mayer described in The Dark Side, such an order not only gave the CIA flexibility, it also protected the President. “To give the President deniability, and to keep him from getting his hands dirty, the finding called for the President to delegate blanket authority to Tenet to decide on a case-by-case basis whom to kill, whom to kidnap, whom to detain and interrogate, and how.” When George Tenet signed written guidelines for the CIA’s torture program in 2003, however, he appeared to have deliberately deprived the President of that deniability by including the source of CIA’s authorization – presumably naming the President – in a document interrogators would see. You can’t blame the CIA Director, after all; Tenet signed the Guidelines just as CIA’s Inspector General and DOJ started to review the legality of the torture tactics used against detainees like Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, who was threatened with a drill and a gun in violation of DOJ’s ban on mock executions.
  • The White House’s fight to keep the short phrase describing Bush’s authorization of the torture program hidden speaks to its apparent ambivalence over the torture program. Even after President Obama released the DOJ memos authorizing torture – along with a damning CIA Inspector General Report and a wide range of documents revealing bureaucratic discussions within the CIA about torture – the White House still fought the release of the phrase that would have made it clear that the CIA conducted this torture at the order of the president. And it did so with a classified declaration from Jones that would have remained secret had Judge Hellerstein not insisted it be made public. As Aftergood noted, such White House intervention in a FOIA suit is rare. “The number of times that a national security advisor has filed a declaration in a FOIA lawsuit is vanishingly small,” he said. “It almost never happens.” But as ACLU Deputy Legal Director Jameel Jaffer noted of the finding, “It was the original authority for the CIA’s secret prisons and for the agency’s rendition and torture program, and apparently it was the authority for the targeted killing program as well.  It was the urtext.  It’s remarkable that after all this time it’s still secret.”
  • President Obama’s willingness to go to such lengths to hide this short phrase may explain the White House’s curious treatment of potentially privileged documents with the Senate now – describing President Bush’s authorization of the torture program and its seemingly contradictory stance supporting publishing the Torture Report while thwarting its completion by withholding privileged documents. After all, the documents in question, like the reference to the presidential finding, may deprive the President of plausible deniability. Furthermore, those documents may undermine one of the conclusions of the Torture Report. According to Senator Ron Wyden, the Senate Torture Report found that “the CIA repeatedly provided inaccurate information about its interrogation program to the White House.” Perhaps the documents reportedly withheld by the White House undermine this conclusion, and instead show that the CIA operated with the full consent and knowledge of at least some people within the White House. Finally, the White House’s sensitivity about documents involved in the torture program may stem from the structure of the finding. As John Rizzo made clear, the finding authorizes not just torturing, but killing, senior al Qaeda figures. Bob Woodward even reported that that CIA would carry out that killing using Predator drones, a program CIA still conducts. And in fact, when the Second Circuit ultimately ruled to let the White House to keep the authorization phrase secret, it did so because the phrase also relates to “a highly classified, active intelligence activity” and “pertains to intelligence activities unrelated to the discontinued [torture] program.” Given what we know about the September 17, 2001 finding, that may well refer to President Obama’s still active drone program.
  • In any case, the White House’s seemingly contradictory statements about the Torture Report might best be understood by its past treatment of CIA documents. By releasing the DOJ memos and other materials, the White House provided what seemed to be unprecedented transparency about what the CIA had done. But all the while it was secretly hiding language describing what the White House has done.
  • Paul Merrell on 15 Mar 14
     
    See also U.N. Convention Against Torture, which the U.S. is a party to. http://www.un.org/documents/ga/res/39/a39r046.htm
Gary Edwards

Pandora Internet Radio - Listen to Free Music You'll Love - 0 views

www.pandora.com/...1484167889615808438

Edward-Snowden Lavabit

shared by Gary Edwards on 10 Aug 13 - No Cached
  • Gary Edwards on 10 Aug 13
     
    Bye bye encryption :( It's incredible to think this could happen in America. Marbux and I recently signed up for lavabit accounts, hoping to use the PGP encryption. And we knew uber patriot Edward Snowden had used Lavabit. Yet, it didn't occur to us that the Feds would shut demand their information and shut them down. We are fools. We take our freedom for granted and expect the Constitution to be upheld and adhered to. It's the law of the land, and no entity, public or private, can trump the law of the land. Yet, here we are. Totally trumped. No longer free. I feel like someone so used to the passing of night into day and back again, my freedom so caught up within the rhythms of the seasons and the passing of time that I am unable to see that it's become night time and darkness everywhere. There will be no return to sunlight unless we make it so. And the Guardian has it right: Cloud Computing will grind to a halt in the USSA. excerpt: "On Thursday afternoon, Ladar Levison, the owner and operator of Lavabit, an email service that prides itself on privacy and security, abruptly closed his website, posting a short message to his former users. "I have been forced to make a difficult decision: to become complicit in crimes against the American people or walk away from nearly 10 years of hard work by shutting down Lavabit," he wrote. "After significant soul searching, I have decided to suspend operations. I wish that I could legally share with you the events that led to my decision. I cannot." Levison might be gagged by the law, but it's not hard to guess at least part of the reason why his site is having legal troubles. In early July, journalists and human rights activists received an email from edsnowden@lavabit.com, inviting them to a press conference in Moscow's Sheremetyevo airport. Given the NSA leaker's understandable desire for security, it is not surprising that Edward Snowden would use a service designed for keeping messages out of prying hand
Paul Merrell

AT&T stores either five or twenty-six years of our data, not really sure which | Privac... - 0 views

www.privacysos.org/1262

surveillance state telecoms data-storage-length AT&T

shared by Paul Merrell on 11 Dec 13 - No Cached
  • In the age of nearly unlimited, cheap data storage, how long do the companies keep this private information about us, their customers? The details vary by company and by data type, ranging from no storage at all (AT&T says it doesn’t keep text messages) to seven years (the length of time AT&T keeps subscriber information, after you’ve canceled your service).  In its letter to Senator Markey, AT&T claims that it keeps call detail records (CDRs) for five years. These are the records the NSA and FBI routinely suck up with a FISC-authorized vacuum cleaner — records showing who we call and when, and how long our calls last. Five years is a long time. Just imagine how surprised you’d be to see the details of your former life — friends from another city, old jobs and acquaintances, your former lovers — if you were handed a social map created by mining your call detail records over a five year period. 
  • But I digress. No, the significance of this data isn’t what has me confused. I’m confused because according to a New York Times report from September 2013, AT&T pays employees to sit with Drug Enforcement Agency units, where the company provides drug warriors with access to “phone data from as far back as 1987.” According to the Times, this program “The Hemisphere Project”, “covers every call that passes through an AT&T switch — not just those made by AT&T customers — and includes calls dating back 26 years.”  Wait a second. Which is it, AT&T? Do you retain call detail records for five years, or forever? 
Paul Merrell

The Secret Government: The Constitution in Crisis - 0 views

www.informationclearinghouse.info/article17720.htm

security state Bill-Moyers Iran-Contra banksters

shared by Paul Merrell on 10 Apr 14 - No Cached
  • This is the full length 90 min. version of Bill Moyer's 1987 scathing critique of the criminal subterfuge carried out by the Executive Branch of the United States Government. Host Bill Moyers exposes the inner workings of the secret government. Though originally broadcast in 1987, it is even more relevant today. Interviews with respected, top military, intelligence, and government insiders reveal both the history and secret objectives
  • This is the full length 90 min. version of Bill Moyer's 1987 scathing critique of the criminal subterfuge carried out by the Executive Branch of the United States Government. Host Bill Moyers exposes the inner workings of the secret government. Though originally broadcast in 1987, it is even more relevant today. Interviews with respected, top military, intelligence, and government insiders reveal both the history and secret objectives
  • Paul Merrell on 10 Apr 14
     
    This is a powerful historical program that delves deeply into the dangers of secret government, using the Iran-Contra scandal as the entry point. It is particularly worth revisiting in light of recent events including the Snowden disclosures and current U.S. efforts to undermine foreign governments that are insufficiently subservient to the banksters. Today's secret government has been growing for a very long time and needs to be understood in its historical context.  
Gary Edwards

The Bailout So Far - WSJ.com Holman W. Jenkins Jr.: - 0 views

online.wsj.com/...SB122826676533474525.html

finacial-crisis economy free-market

shared by Gary Edwards on 03 Dec 08 - Cached
  • Gary Edwards on 03 Dec 08
     
    Washington a few months ago might have bought the entire stock of subprime mortgages for about half the money committed by the Fed and Treasury last week to prop up Citigroup and spur consumer and mortgage lending. Buying up bad mortgages would at least have left the private sector in charge of issuing new credit, which -- however bad its performance during the housing bubble -- would likely produce better results than government directing credit allocation in the economy. They (Federal Reserve-Treasury-FDIC-Congress) failed to douse the confidence/systemic-risk fire and now have moved on to fighting recession by turning credit allocation into a public utility. Vikram Pandit of Citigroup says: "We have gone from arm's length, free market, just-in-time availability" of funding to a system where big credit-reliant businesses now have only one place to turn, government.
  • Gary Edwards on 03 Dec 08
     
    Maybe Washington will succeed in forestalling a deep and prolonged recession. Maybe all the money ($8 trillion by one count) being printed to acquire or insure mortgages, student loans, credit card receivables, commercial paper and banking shares will be seamlessly withdrawn once those assets are sold back to willing parties in the private sector when the panic has passed. Maybe taxpayers will even make a profit on the deal.
Paul Merrell

Debunked: The Official Conspiracy Theory of 9/11 | Global Research - 0 views

www.globalresearch.ca/...5349573

war & peace false-flag 9-11 parody

shared by Paul Merrell on 01 Jun 14 - No Cached
  • James Corbett of corbettreport.com presents this 5 minute parody of the official conspiracy theory of 9/11.
  • Paul Merrell on 01 Jun 14
     
    Well done satirical video, 4:55 min. in length.
Paul Merrell

Sorry for letting them snoop? Dell apologizes for 'inconvenience' caused by NSA backdoo... - 0 views

rt.com/...ell-appelbaum-30c3-apology-027

surveillance state NSA NSA-methods backdoors NSA-backdoors hardware

shared by Paul Merrell on 01 Jan 14 - No Cached
  • Security researcher Jacob Appelbaum dropped a bombshell of sorts earlier this week when he accused American tech companies of placing government-friendly backdoors in their devices. Now Texas-based Dell Computers is offering an apology. Or to put it more accurately, Dell told an irate customer on Monday that they “regret the inconvenience” caused by selling to the public for years a number of products that the intelligence community has been able to fully compromise in complete silence up until this week. Dell, Apple, Western Digital and an array of other Silicon Valley-firms were all name-checked during Appelbaum’s hour-long presentation Monday at the thirtieth annual Chaos Communication Congress in Hamburg, Germany. As RT reported then, the 30-year-old hacker-cum-activist unveiled before the audience at the annual expo a collection of never-before published National Security Agency documents detailing how the NSA goes to great lengths to compromise the computers and systems of groups on its long list of adversaries.
  • Spreading viruses and malware to infect targets and eavesdrop on their communications is just one of the ways the United States’ spy firm conducts surveillance, Appelbaum said. Along with those exploits, he added, the NSA has been manually inserting microscopic computer chips into commercially available products and using custom-made devices like hacked USB cables to silently collect intelligence. One of the most alarming methods of attack discussed during his address, however, comes as a result of all but certain collusion on the part of major United States tech companies. The NSA has information about vulnerabilities in products sold by the biggest names in the US computer industry, Appelbaum said, and at the drop off a hat the agency has the ability of launching any which type of attack to exploit the flaws in publically available products.
  • The NSA has knowledge pertaining to vulnerabilities in computer servers made by Dell and even Apple’s highly popular iPhone, among other devices, Appelbaum told his audience. “Hey Dell, why is that?” Appelbaum asked. “Love to hear your statement about that.”
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • Appelbaum didn’t leave Dell off the hook after revealing just that one exploit known to the NSA, however. Before concluding his presentation, he displayed a top-secret document in which the agency makes reference to a hardware implant that could be manually installed onto Dell PowerEdge servers to exploit the JTAG debugging interface on its processor — a critical circuitry component that apparently contains a vulnerability known to the US government. “Why did Dell leave a JTAG debugging interface on these servers?” asked Appelbaum. “Because it’s like leaving a vulnerability in. Is that a bugdoor, or a backdoor or just a mistake? Well hopefully they will change these things or at least make it so that if you were to see this, you would know that you have some problems. Hopefully Dell will release some information about how to mitigate this advance persistent threat.” Appelbaum also provoked Apple by acknowledging that the NSA boasts of being able to hack into any of their mobile devices running the iOS operating system. “Either they have a huge collection of exploits that work against Apple products — meaning they are hoarding information about critical systems American companies product and sabotaging them — or Apple sabotages it themselves,” he said.
  • @DellCares @dellcarespro Inconvenience? You got to be F*ckin kidding me! You place an NSA bug in our servers and call it an inconvenience? — Martijn Wismeijer (@twiet) December 31, 2013
  • TechDirt reporter Mike Masnick noticed early Tuesday that Dell’s official customer service Twitter account opted to issue a cookie-cutter response that drips of insincerity. “Thanks you for reaching out and regret the inconvenience,” the Dell account tweeted to Wismeijer. “Our colleagues at @DellCaresPro will be able to help you out.” “Inconvenience? You got to be F*ckin kidding me!” Wismeijer responded. “You place an NSA bug in our servers and call it an inconvenience?”
  • Security researcher Jacob Appelbaum dropped a bombshell of sorts earlier this week when he accused American tech companies of placing government-friendly backdoors in their devices. Now Texas-based Dell Computers is offering an apology. Or to put it more accurately, Dell told an irate customer on Monday that they “regret the inconvenience” caused by selling to the public for years a number of products that the intelligence community has been able to fully compromise in complete silence up until this week. Dell, Apple, Western Digital and an array of other Silicon Valley-firms were all name-checked during Appelbaum’s hour-long presentation Monday at the thirtieth annual Chaos Communication Congress in Hamburg, Germany. As RT reported then, the 30-year-old hacker-cum-activist unveiled before the audience at the annual expo a collection of never-before published National Security Agency documents detailing how the NSA goes to great lengths to compromise the computers and systems of groups on its long list of adversaries.
Paul Merrell

Netanyahu: US has 'no greater ally' than Israel | MSNBC - 0 views

www.msnbc.com/...-ally-than-israel-415407683752

war & peace Israel Palestine Netanyahu interview 2-state-solution must--read

shared by Paul Merrell on 20 Mar 15 - No Cached
  • In his first interview since re-election, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu tells Andrea Mitchell that the U.S. has no greater ally than Israel, and says his address to Congress was not meant to disrespect President Obama. ... more Duration: 8:56
  • In his first interview since re-election, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu tells Andrea Mitchell that the U.S. has no greater ally than Israel, and says his address to Congress was not meant to disrespect President Obama. ... more Duration: 8:56
  • Paul Merrell on 20 Mar 15
     
    This is the video in which Nertanyahu does his 180  degree turn on the 2-state solution, claiming that he never said what he said.  For 9 long minutes. Delightful 
Paul Merrell

CIA 'running arms smuggling team in Benghazi when consulate was attacked' - Telegraph - 0 views

www.telegraph.co.uk/...en-consulate-was-attacked.html

war & peace Libya Benghazi Syria CIA weapons-ratline cover-up

shared by Paul Merrell on 13 Feb 15 - No Cached
  • CIA 'running arms smuggling team in Benghazi when consulate was attacked' The CIA has been subjecting operatives to monthly polygraph tests in an attempt to suppress details of a reported US arms smuggling operation in Benghazi that was ongoing when its ambassador was killed by a mob in the city last year, according to reports. .newGigyaShare { display: none !important; }
  • Up to 35 CIA operatives were working in the city during the attack last September on the US consulate that resulted in the death of Ambassador Chris Stevens and three other Americans, according to CNN. The circumstances of the attack are a subject of deep division in the US with some Congressional leaders pressing for a wide-ranging investigation into suspicions that the government has withheld details of its activities in the Libyan city. The television network said that a CIA team was working in an annex near the consulate on a project to supply missiles from Libyan armouries to Syrian rebels.
  • Sources said that more Americans were hurt in the assault spearheaded by suspected Islamic radicals than had been previously reported. CIA chiefs were actively working to ensure the real nature of its operations in the city did not get out. So only the losses suffered by the State Department in the city had been reported to Congress.
  • Paul Merrell on 13 Feb 15
     
    This is all information that has been out there in the alternative media for over a year. But CNN has decided to push it forward now.  If you click through and watch the CNN segment, you'll learn about the incredible lengths CIA is going to keep anyone with knowledge of actual events from talking to media or Congress.  What is being covered up is the fact that the Obama administration authorized the ratline of weapons from Libya to Syria long before Congress authorized the arming of the Syrian opposition. 
  • Paul Merrell on 13 Feb 15
     
    Correction: These articles are from 2013. I forgot to check the dates before posting and made the mistake of thinking they were knew.
Gary Edwards

STRATFOR George Friedman predictions for the future - Business Insider - 1 views

www.businessinsider.com/dictions-for-the-future-2016-2

STRATFOR George-Friedman

shared by Gary Edwards on 28 Feb 16 - No Cached
  • Gary Edwards on 28 Feb 16
     
    excellent read with lots of non political reality based thinking. good stuff, even if you disagree. "George Friedman founded Strategic Forecasting in 1996. Stratfor's existence is based on the controversial but now influential premise that geopolitical events can be anticipated and even predicted in ways that can benefit private-sector actors. Friedman stayed at the pioneering political-risk firm until May 2015, when he left to found a new company called Geopolitical Futures. Friedman is a commentator on international affairs and author of the book "The Next 100 Years." He spoke to Business Insider earlier this month about the future of war, the next stage in the European debt crisis, and how and whether it's even possible to predict what's coming next. This interview has been edited for length and clarity."
Paul Merrell

What was the Israeli involvement in collecting U.S. communications intel for NSA? - Dip... - 0 views

www.haaretz.com/...cations-intel-for-nsa-1.528529

security state NSA digital surveillance Israel IDF Unit-8200

shared by Paul Merrell on 10 Jun 13 - No Cached
  • Were Israeli companies Verint and Narus the ones that collected information from the U.S. communications network for the National Security Agency? The question arises amid controversy over revelations that the NSA has been collecting the phone records of hundreds of millions of Americans every day, creating a database through which it can learn whether terror suspects have been in contact with people in the United States. It also was disclosed this week that the NSA has been gathering all Internet usage - audio, video, photographs, emails and searches - from nine major U.S. Internet providers, including Microsoft and Google, in hopes of detecting suspicious behavior that begins overseas.
  • According to an article in the American technology magazine "Wired" from April 2012, two Israeli companies – which the magazine describes as having close connections to the Israeli security community – conduct bugging and wiretapping for the NSA. Verint, which took over its parent company Comverse Technology earlier this year, is responsible for tapping the communication lines of the American telephone giant Verizon, according to a past Verizon employee sited by James Bamford in Wired. Neither Verint nor Verizon commented on the matter.
  • Natus, which was acquired in 2010 by the American company Boeing, supplied the software and hardware used at AT&T wiretapping rooms, according to whistleblower Mark Klein, who revealed the information in 2004. Klein, a past technician at AT&T who filed a suit against the company for spying on its customers, revealed a "secret room" in the company's San Fransisco office, where the NSA collected data on American citizens' telephone calls and Internet surfing. Klein's claims were reinforced by former NSA employee Thomas Drake who testified that the agency uses a program produced by Narus to save the personal electrical communications of AT&T customers.  Both Verint and Narus have ties to the Israeli intelligence agency and the Israel Defense Forces intelligence-gathering unit 8200. Hanan Gefen, a former commander of the 8200 unit, told Forbes magazine in 2007 that Comverse's technology, which was formerly the parent company of Verint and merged with it this year, was directly influenced by the technology of 8200. Ori Cohen, one of the founders of Narus, told Fortune magazine in 2001 that his partners had done technology work for the Israeli intelligence.
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • "Nobody is listening to your telephone calls," Obama assured the nation after two days of reports that many found unsettling. What the government is doing, he said, is digesting phone numbers and the durations of calls, seeking links that might "identify potential leads with respect to folks who might engage in terrorism." If there's a hit, he said, "if the intelligence community then actually wants to listen to a phone call, they've got to go back to a federal judge, just like they would in a criminal investigation."
  • Obama said U.S. intelligence officials are looking at phone numbers and lengths of calls - not at people's names - and not listening in.
  • Paul Merrell on 10 Jun 13
     
    It figures that the Israeli creators of the Stuxnet worm would be involved. And here we also get our reminder why Obama is lying. We hearken back to the days when several ISPs and Telcos were being sued in class actions for providing NSA with access to their subscriber's phone calls and internet traffic.  Those suits ended only after Congress passed legislation immunizing the companies from suit for collaboration with NSA. The net effect was to allow the NSA to continue eavesdropping. So it matters not that Prism allegedly only gets the communications metadata. NSA need only correlate the metadata with the actual communications obtained from the Telcos and ISPs.   
Paul Merrell

ACLU sues over NSA surveillance program - The Washington Post - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...2-a73e-826d299ff459_story.html

surveillance state NSA ACLU litigation

shared by Paul Merrell on 14 Jun 13 - No Cached
  • The American Civil Liberties Union filed a lawsuit Tuesday challenging the constitutionality of the U.S. government surveillance program that collects the telephone records of millions of Americans from U.S. telecommunications companies. It is the first substantive lawsuit following reports in The Washington Post and the Guardian last week that detailed two vast surveillance programs run by the National Security Agency under laws authorized by Congress after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.
  • The ACLU suit, filed in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, challenges the legality of the spy agency’s collection of customer “metadata,” including the phone numbers dialed and the length of calls. The lawsuit asks the court to force the government to end the program and purge any records it has collected, and to declare that the surveillance is unconstitutional.
  • The program, details of which were first disclosed by the Guardian, collects such information, used by intelligence analysts to detect patterns and personal connections, on every phone call made or received by U.S. customers of major American phone companies. The once-secret program was acknowledged last week by Director of National Intelligence James R. Clapper Jr., who is named in the ACLU lawsuit.
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